These are my links for February 24th through February 25th:

• Belgium signals more cooperation over tax cheats - by fully joining the EU STD - Belgium's Finance Minister, Didier Reynders, said on Tuesday the country will improve cooperation and transparency with its European Union partners in tackling possible tax evasion. Belgium is only one of three countries -- the other two are Austria and Luxembourg -- that have opt outs from EU rules on taxing savings held by a citizens outside their home state.
• Editorial: Clouds continue to gather over tax havens - "In a lengthy article on Saturday, under the headline “Clouds gather over tax havens”, Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper asked the question, as Gordon Brown urges global action, will the offshore industry survive the fall-out from the Stanford fraud charges?"

  Cayman knows it's all over

• FT.com / Companies / Technology - Gmail crash fuels web services fears - "Google’s e-mail service, used by more than 100m people, suffered a global crash on Tuesday, raising concerns about the world’s growing reliance on web services.

  The Gmail outage lasted more than two hours from about 1.30am on the US West Coast, hitting users in Europe and Asia hardest as America slept"

  And very annoying it was too.....

• FT.com / Europe - Latvia debt rating cut to ‘junk’ - It won't be the last to get this status
• FT.com / Europe - Iceland scraps threat to UK over asset freeze - Maybe they're seeing sense at last

  And maybe they're realising that the world has changed

  Either way, this is a wise decision

• Liechtenstein prince faces German tax inquiry - Times Online - "A prince of the House of Liechtenstein, one of the world’s wealthiest royal families, is being investigated for tax evasion in Germany.

  Prince Max von und zu Liechtenstein, chief executive of the principality’s largest bank LGT and son of the ruler Hans-Adam II, has been accused of withholding millions in taxes.

  Based in Munich, he is the most prominent figure to be affected by one of the greatest tax evasion scandals of recent times after one of his former employees sold confidential bank data to the German equivalent of MI6"

  Excellent

  Send him down

• University of Bums on Seats - Welcome - I was searching UBS yesterday and this came up

  Go on - award yourself a PhD. You know you're worth it